The Relevance of Manufacturing Flexibility in the Context of Industrie 4.0

Abstract Manufacturing companies have to withstand a growing global competition on different strategic dimensions like production costs, product quality and product innovation. To cope with this increased competition, companies in high-wage countries often employ a differentiation strategy to meet individual customer needs, as it becomes increasingly challenging to justify higher production costs through superior product quality. Manufacturing flexibility as a strategic orientation has been discussed in engineering and management literature for several decades with growing interest in the recent past. As a result of this development, scientific literature has focused on a multitude of topics including flexibility as a reactive and proactive strategy. This paper summarizes the different research streams associated with production flexibility, building on the groundbreaking work of Donald Gerwin [1] , who introduced flexibility as a strategic perspective and developed a framework that illustrates the relationship between manufacturing strategy, environmental uncertainty and methods for delivering flexibility. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to identify the relationships between flexibility and performance by systematically charting empirical findings from the literature and to link this development to the advancements of manufacturing schemes of Industrie 4.0. We use our findings to allocate the literature stream of production and manufacturing flexibility in the framework of Industrie 4.0, proposed by Schuh et al. [2] . The relevance of the discussed relationships are verified with different research groups in the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology in High-Wage Countries” of the RWTH Aachen University.